Peter Bedlek

“There was a directive passed in February that all from Krušetnica were partisans. Back then, there weren’t mayors, but commissars. So the commissar received a request to enlist all men aged from 18 to 30 years. There was a drummer appealing in the village that all the men being from 18 to 30 years old were supposed to line up by the church. It was such a village centre near the church. I don’t know how many men came, but there were only very few missing. My brother and our neighbor decided they wouldn’t go there. They hid themselves. However, there was a second drumming, where the command was clear – families of those who didn’t enlist themselves, would’ve been shot down. Thus at last they went to this church and got enlisted. The sledge riders got ready, since there was a lot of snow, and at three o’clock they went though Dolný Kubín to Martin, carrying food for three days and their clothes. In Martin’s military barracks they were taking off the roofing tiles, as they had nothing to eat. The Germans didn’t feed them.”

“After the so-called ‘čepobitie’, such a military music march in Bohemia, there was an evening assessment around nine or nine-thirty. There were line-ups or full combat gear readiness, and the assessment was carried out according to what was the order like. I don’t want to go into details, since you know it from the stories already, but there was a lot of swearing and jawing. They called us different names – traitors, enemies, and so on. It was everywhere. And those political workers, officers, ranked as second lieutenants or such, always viewed us as enemies and traitors. If one was somewhere later on, he mustn’t have said he belonged to the PTP or that he owned black shoulder loops. This way he would’ve revealed the military secret.”